on is
to a pleader. In these professions the judgment is undermined, the mind
loses its lucid rectitude. The writer lives by taking sides. Thus,
we may distinguish two kinds of criticism, as in painting we may
distinguish art from practical dexterity. Criticism, after the pattern
of most contemporary leader-writers, is the expression of judgments
formed at random in a more or less witty way, just as an advocate pleads
in court on the most contradictory briefs. The newspaper critic always
finds a subject to work up in the book he is discussing. Done after this
fashion, the business is well adapted to indolent brains, to men devoid
of the sublime faculty of imagination, or, possessed of it indeed, but
lacking courage to cultivate it. Every play, every book comes to their
pen as a subject, making no demand on their imagination, and of which
they simply write a report, seriously or in irony, according to the
mood of the moment. As to an opinion, whatever it may be, French wit can
always justify it, being admirably ready to defend either side of any
case. And conscience counts for so little, these _bravi_ have so little
value for their own words, that they will loudly praise in the greenroom
the work they tear to tatters in print.

Nay, men have been known to transfer their services from one paper to
another without being at the pains to consider that the opinions of the
new sheet must be diametrically antagonistic to those of the old. Madame
de la Baudraye could smile to see Lousteau with one article on the
Legitimist side and one on the side of the new dynasty, both on the same
occasion. She admired the maxim he preached:

"We are the attorneys of public opinion."

The other kind of criticism is a science. It necessitates a thorough
comprehension of each work, a lucid insight into the tendencies of the
age, the adoption of a system, and faith in fixed principles--that is to
say, a scheme of jurisprudence, a summing-up, and a verdict. The critic
is then a magistrate of ideas, the censor of his time; he fulfils a
sacred function; while in the former case he is but an acrobat who turns
somersaults for a living so long as he had a leg to stand on. Between
Claude Vignon and Lousteau lay the gulf that divides mere dexterity from
art.

Dinah, whose mind was soon freed from rust, and whose intellect was by
no means narrow, had ere long taken literary measure of her idol. She
saw Lousteau working up to the last minute under the